A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to quality of service guarantees and, more particularly, to systems and methods for providing connectivity service-level guarantees for network communication.
B. Description of Related Art
In the highly competitive Internet service provision industry, service-level guarantees (SLGs) have become an extremely important market differentiator. The trend in SLGs has included a movement toward service contracts that attach financial penalties to failures to meet certain key network performance criteria. Since the industry remains in a state of flux, service providers must constantly extend and revise their SLGs to compete. As a result, service providers must face the dilemma of formulating meaningful performance criteria to attract and retain business, while avoiding imposing a financially ruinous burden on the company.
An important aspect of SLGs is compliance monitoring. Currently, SLGs are reactive in the sense that customers must monitor performance and submit a claim when they experience poor service. At the same time, however, the service provider must monitor its own performance, both to make sure that sufficient resources are available to comply with its SLGs, and to verify and validate customer claims.
A typical SLG criteria includes the measurement of connectivity or reachability (i.e., a determination of the availability of a network resource). Conventional systems measure connectivity by pinging (i.e., sending an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) ping packet to a resource and waiting for a reply) every resource, such as a router, from every resource. This produces an unmanageable burden, however, on network resources. In addition, sending the pings between all possible source-destination pairs, as well as collecting and analyzing the data, requires processing that is very difficult to administer.
As a result, a need exists for a system that facilitates monitoring of connectivity to validate customer SLG claims.
Systems and methods consistent with the present invention address this need by pinging select network resources and combining the results to monitor connectivity and validate customer SLG claims.
In accordance with the purpose of the invention as embodied and broadly described herein, a system monitors performance in a network that includes several network resources. The system obtains a list of targets in the network. The targets include selected ones of the resources. The system sends a request to the targets, receives responses from the targets, and determines a status of the targets based on the received responses or a lack of responses from the targets. The system then analyzes the status of the targets to determine compliance with the service-level guarantee.
In another implementation consistent with the present invention, a method validates customer claims relating to performance in a network. The method includes periodically collecting network status records, the network status records being obtained by pinging select resources in the network; receiving one of the customer claims, the claim identifying a path in the network between a source and a destination and a time interval for which an outage was experienced; identifying resources located on the path; analyzing the network status records relating to the identified resources to determine whether any of the identified resources experienced an outage lasting at least a predetermined period of time.
In a further implementation consistent with the present invention, a method for validating a claim relating to a service-level guarantee includes receiving the claim from a customer, the claim identifying a first path in a network from a source to a destination, a second path from the destination to the source, and a time interval for which an outage was experienced in the network; and validating the claim by collecting network status data reflecting availability of resources along the first and second paths and determining compliance with the service-level guarantee based on the collected network status data.